The World Makes Me Fizzy
A metaphor for autistic sensory overload
The other night I came up with (in my humble opinion) an excellent metaphor to explain sensory overload in an autistic person compared to a neurotypical person. Ok, here goes…
Imagine you are a big bottle of coke: one of those huge 2L bottles. Now, imagine the fizzy liquid inside is your emotions. Every time you undergo a sensory experience - chatter in a coffee shop, bright lights in the supermarket, smelling someone’s perfume at work etc. - someone shakes the bottle of coke.
Now, in a neurotypical person the bottle is only half filled with coke. This means when the bottle is shaken not an awful lot happens. There are some bubbles inside but they are contained. If we opened that bottle it would make that satisfying little tsk noise, but the coke would stay inside the bottle.
However, in an autistic person the bottle is full with coke. This means when the bottle is shaken the pressure inside is building and building. The bubbles inside have nowhere to go guaranteeing the bottle will explode and fizz everywhere when opened.
Neurotypical folk generally have the capacity for the coke (their emotions) to be shaken around a bit. There is extra space in their bottle when they start their day. They can go to a noisy coffee shop, chat with colleagues in their busy office, be in a lift with someone wearing Coco Chanel and not even notice it. They can go about their day without thinking too much about how all this stimulus might be affecting them. How much their metaphorical bottle is being shaken. At the end of the day when they finish work they might feel a little tired out but are usually still able to socialise in the evening or cook dinner or walk their dog without too much stress.
Autistic folk on the other hand physically don’t have any buffer space in their bottle. It is already full to the brim when they start the day. So, when they go about their day every small interaction and sensory input furiously shakes the bottle causing the coke to build pressure inside. And it isn’t just obvious things that cause the bottle to shake like loud coffee shops or fluorescent lights at the supermarket. It’s also things like someone wearing perfume or touching something slimy or feeling the label in your clothes. By the end of the day when they are allowed to stop and unmask, that bottle explodes.
Science tells us that energy cannot be created and cannot be destroyed, it merely changes from one form to another. This means even if the bottle of coke doesn’t explode that evening, the pressurised emotions won’t just disappear, despite how hard we might try through masking. They wait there, bubbling just beneath the surface until the lid can’t hold it in anymore. It is not if the bottle will explode, but when.
Food for thought:
(what does that even mean??)
In total we receive, through our five senses, more than 11 million bits of information each second of the day. However, scientists believe our conscious mind can only deal with less than 100 bits per second1. So if the conscious mind can only deal with less than 0.001% of all information coming in, imagine your brain is wired differently and cannot filter out all that incoming information sufficiently.
This is autistic overload.
When all the senses become overstimulated due to not being able to filter out certain input, the bottle explodes resulting in the coke fizzing everywhere and making a huge mess (i.e. an autistic meltdown).
If you are autistic, what do you think? Does this metaphor feel accurate? If you’re not autistic, is this a helpful way to reframe/understand sensory overload?
P.S. I look up the etymology of ‘food for thought’:
Anything that gives you a reason to stop and ponder is food for thought. It's an expression that's been around in its current form since the nineteenth century, apparently taking the idea of digestion and transferring it from the stomach to the brain.